By the time my father, Bernard, started Australian Vogue on March 1, 1959, he was a young man with a fierce determination to establish it as the premier glossy magazine in the country, particularly in the face of all the naysayers who said it couldn't be done; that, indeed, the magazine was too snooty and highbrow for an egalitarian society like Australia's.

My father wanted to prove them wrong. And to realise his vision he had to educate advertisers on why they needed to place their business with an upmarket magazine instead of mass-market publications. For that to happen he had to entertain them - often. Which was why there were always so many martini-soaked lunches and dinners for friends and colleagues from the fashion, cosmetics and advertising world held in our family home on Sydney's north shore.

Coming of age: David Leser, aged 13 at his bar mitzvah in 1969 with his father Bernard. Photo: Courtesy of David Leser

A regular at our house during these early days was Norma Mary Marshall, my father's assistant, who would later go on to become the magazine's advertising manager. I was besotted with Norma Mary. To me, she had the hair of an angel and the most wonderful cleavage I'd ever seen. I was five years old when I first invited her into my bed. "Would you like to get in and have a cuddle?" I suggested when she'd come to my room to kiss me goodnight. "That's a sweet offer," she replied. "Perhaps not tonight."

Seven years later, Veruschka von Lehndorff, the German-born supermodel, arrived for supper with her Italian photographer boyfriend, Franco Rubartelli, and again it was love at first sight. She was the most attractive, elusive creature I'd ever seen. I knew nothing, of course, about how she'd come to be a supermodel; nothing about her Prussian count father, who'd been executed in Germany in 1944 for his role in the plot to kill Hitler; nothing about her mother, who'd been imprisoned by the Gestapo, nor anything about the fact that Veruschka herself, along with her sister, had been interned in a POW camp for the remainder of the war.

All I could see through the Turkish-bath lens of my pubescent fantasies was a future linked to this six-foot-tall Aryan beauty. Would she leave Rubartelli for me? If she did, what would I do then? And how would we dance, given she was more than six feet tall and I wasn't quite five foot four?

On another occasion, I found myself sitting opposite Dame Margot Fonteyn. England's finest prima ballerina had come to dinner at our home with her wheelchair-bound husband, the former Panamanian politician and ambassador Roberto Arias. I was 13 and, once again, hopelessly unaware of the company I was in. This ignorance extended, naturally, to ballet, but also to politics and how it was that Mr Arias had come to be paralysed from the waist down. Perhaps my parents had told me that he'd been suspected of organising a coup against the government of Panama, and that five years earlier he'd been shot in the back by a former political ally. I doubt it.

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What I know now, though, is that at the time of the assassination attempt, Dame Margot had been planning to leave him but, instead, had chosen to devote her life to tending his needs, forcing herself to dance until she was 60 - and bankrupting herself in order to pay for his medical bills. And this despite all the grief he'd apparently caused her with his long absences and serial adultery.

I was aware of none of this while watching Dame Margot spoon-feed the paraplegic Roberto Arias the herrings my mother had prepared for them. All I sensed was that the world, my world, was full of interesting people and that I was drinking in something important about them from my parents.

Family time: Leser, aged eight, on holidays with his father in 1964. Photo: courtesy of David Leser

I was also imbibing something about being Jewish - this inchoate sense of being special, marked, chosen, of having a different language, a different set of dates and rituals and customs, of belonging to a dark history and contested geography that few others in my own shallow-rooted country could claim to possess, unless, of course, they were the indigenous Australians we never thought much about.

As a young Jewish boy growing up in Australia, I sometimes felt as though I'd entered the picnic grounds through the wrong gate. It felt like I'd come out of the pine forest, covered in damp and nettles, while everyone else had been leaning against the palm trees, gazing out at the Pacific breakers. Often I had this feeling of immense gloom and foreboding. Gloom over what had happened in the Shoah, of things so calamitous they could never be accounted for, let alone properly explained. And foreboding - a deep, abiding sense that something awful might still occur if we weren't careful, if we didn't stick together, if we didn't remain forever strong.

The air I breathed was charged with anxiety and, at times, a feeling of unutterable sadness. We'd come from somewhere else, somewhere European but also pre-European; God-granted but God-forsaken; civilised but brutish and wretched. Everyone who was Jewish had suffered and knew other Jews who had also suffered. You couldn't possibly be part of this community, this people, this nation, this universe of suffering, unless you took all this to heart and made it your own, even if you didn't understand it. It was like having bars of misery playing through your bones, with their own distinct notes and lamentations.

When I was in synagogue as a young boy, I would look at all the men and their sons and wonder whether they, too, were carrying the same enormous weight of sadness. I felt sure they were because, otherwise, why was there so much keening, so much mournful prayer, so much hand-wringing going on behind those big old green iron gates of the Great Synagogue in Elizabeth Street, Sydney?

There was only one redemption in all of this for me, however, and it lay not in any afterlife but immediately above me in the upstairs gallery of the synagogue. Every Saturday morning all the dark-eyed daughters of the faith would be sitting with their mothers and grandmothers, looking down on us boys with blushing cheeks and furtive gazes, and it was then that I, 12 years old and fast approaching puberty, would thank the Almighty Lord for having saved my family from the ovens, for having allowed me to be born so that I might share one day soon - God willing, perhaps even at Marty Rosenberg's party next Saturday night - the ambrosial delights of Margot or Virginia or Donna or Karen or Debbie or Vivian or Marilyn or Lesley or Sandy or either of the two Susies.

These synagogue maidens were the girls of my generation from good Jewish families who would one day marry the boys from good Jewish families, but who, at this deliciously uncertain point in our history - the late '60s to be precise - were still very much up for grabs for a kiss or fondle or something higher, lower and deeper.

"Did you go upstairs outside with her?" a friend asked me at a party one night, giving me a conspiratorial wink. I was 13 at the time.

"Sure," I said, not knowing what he meant, especially given that the house was only single storey and there were no balconies.

"What was it like?" he said.

"Great," I replied.

"What about downstairs inside? Did you go there?"

"Look, we've been down there most of the night," I said, revealing my astonishing ignorance of the codes of teenage petting. It was then he explained that "upstairs outside" was the term for fondling the breast from outside the clothes, and that "downstairs inside" ... Well, you'd have to have been Joshua entering the Land of Canaan to have spent even a minute in that place, and I was not him, although I most definitely had aspirations in that direction.

On the weekends I would spend most of my Sundays in the eastern suburbs with other Jewish kids, vying for the favour of one of these girls, hoping to see what was underneath their bikinis once we'd managed to get them from Bondi Beach to somewhere less public. We would congregate on the stairs outside the main pavilion at Bondi - a place dubbed Little Jerusalem because of the number of (mostly on heat) Jewish kids who hung out there.

Most of those girls were in the Great Synagogue on that day in February 1969 when I was bar mitzvahed, a quivering wreck of a boy-man trying to sing in a foreign language with a voice still cracking into the downward registers of adulthood.

I remember that day for a number of reasons, chief among them being the terror of singing in front of a packed synagogue, and the panic that overwhelmed me when I suddenly lost my place halfway through the service. I froze in front of a full congregation, until my teacher, Rabbi Israel Porush, the man responsible for guiding and moulding the reconstruction of Judaism in Australia following World War II, walked over to me, singing the words I'd forgotten, and pointing to the correct place on the page.

As managing director of Vogue my father not only employed and promoted women, he also cultivated their rich talents. He listened to them. Advised them. Guided and motivated them. Earned their trust and respect. Became godfather to some of their children. Befriended them in ways that would leave their indelible mark not just on him, but on my brother and myself. Women like the Hungarian-born clothes empress, Maria Finlay; top fashion designers Norma Tullo and Carla Zampatti; famed artist Judy Cassab; high-profile PR consultant Glen Marie Frost; British journalist Erica Goatly; former Vogue beauty editor and Estee Lauder publicity director Mary Ellen Ayrton; Vogue editor Eve Harman; her successor, Northern Irish-born June McCallum; her successor again, Pittsburgh-born beauty Nancy Pilcher. All these smart, elegant, gifted people who would fuel my love of - and desire for deep friendships with - extraordinary women.

Suddenly, one miraculous God-flouting night, I was given permission to enter the Promised Land. I was 14 years old and visiting my ex-girlfriend and her mother, Mrs G.

"Are you still awake, David?" Mrs G called from her bedroom.

"Hmm," I mumbled, feigning sleep in the living room.

"Are you still awake?"

"Yes, sort of," I half whispered, wanting her to think I was asleep. Crazy as it sounds, I was still wearing shorty pyjamas. They were my favourite. They had red trains on them.

"Come in here and keep me company," she said.

"Sorry?" I replied, no longer remotely sleepy.

I'd had a strong sense this was going to be the night of a major train derailment after we'd gone to see The Graduate at the Rose Bay Wintergarden Theatre that evening. Mrs G could have taken her daughter and me to see Gone With the Wind or The Dirty Dozen, but she hadn't. She'd chosen that epoch-defining movie in which Dustin Hoffman's bumbling Benjamin Braddock is seduced by Anne Bancroft's older, sexually aggressive Mrs Robinson.

My parents barely knew Mrs G, but they were trusting - or clueless - enough to think that if I stayed the night at her house I would return home the same boy who had gone off to the movies the day before. They hadn't seen The Graduate.

"Come in here," my Mrs Robinson called again from her bedroom. "I want you to keep me company." By this time, my train was beginning to hoot and steam and move steadily up the tracks. I got out of bed -actually a couch in the living room of her small apartment - and moved cautiously towards her bedroom.

My ex-girlfriend was asleep in the next room and her brother, two years younger, was shut away in a third bedroom down the hall. Mr G was no longer living with the family, so the coast was clear for me to step into the marital chamber and perch myself, shivering, on the end of Mrs G's bed. She was dressed in a soft pink nightgown and was watching Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn having a domestic argument in black and white. The film was Charade.

"You look cold. Get in here," she said, patting the sheets next to her.

"I'll be okay," I squeaked.

"Don't be silly, David - get in here and watch the movie with me." The train was now beginning to throb and career out of control.

Suddenly my trolley was leaping from the rail yard, searching for a tunnel through the shorts and into the waiting clutches of my veteran conductor. No kissing, no fondling, no lovemaking, just a passionless late-night shunting from Bewilderment Station to Mercy Street. I decided not to stay and watch Cary Grant repair his relationship with Audrey Hepburn. After 15 minutes I went back to the couch and tried to sleep.

Within an hour my caboose had begun to rattle once more. "I thought you'd be back," she said, barely stirring, and this time pulling me on top of her.

Within seconds I was plunging into what I thought was the deepest point of entry into her dark cave. I found myself abseiling down the walls. Must be somewhere here, I thought before she took me in her white witch's hand and guided me into the widest, warmest, wettest place I'd ever had the holy pleasure of finding myself in.

I came like a fire hose within 20 seconds ... No, make that 10. But this time I had the good sense to take hold of the church bells under her nightgown and give them a mighty good tweaking.

They were fine breasts, too, round and ample in my small hands, and I remember lying there on top of her in the hours before dawn, thinking: "The guys at school are never going to believe this."

She must have read my mind because she said to me, "Now this is strictly between you and me, David - you know that, don't you?" I nodded vigorously, having absolutely no intention of ever keeping my word.

As I was still good friends with Mrs G's daughter, I went back to their place on a regular basis for the next nine months.

Once a fortnight, on average, I would take the school bus in the opposite direction to home and go and shag my ex-girlfriend's mother. Usually she'd have music on - the new Crosby, Stills and Nash album, David Bowie's The Man Who Sold the World - and there'd be incense burning as I walked into the kitchen for a glass of milk and an Arrowroot biscuit.

"How was school?" she'd ask, but I knew she wasn't the slightest bit interested in what I'd learnt that day because, mid-stream, she'd wander off into the living room singing along with Stephen Stills' Wooden Ships.

I'd follow her a few minutes later with a milk moustache and a violent heaving in my shorts to find her sitting on the couch with her dress hoisted up around her hips and her tanned legs opened wide, looking at me with the first pair of bedroom eyes I'd ever encountered.

"You took long enough," she'd say with a dirty smirk, and I knew there wasn't going to be any maths homework that afternoon.

Sometimes we'd linger on the couch for 15 minutes while she undid my school tie and shirt with quick, deft fingers. At other times I'd walk into her apartment to find her already in the bedroom. No glass of milk or Arrowroot in sight. No unloosening of the school tie. Just a quick advance into her Red-Light District.

In the evening we'd have dinner - the mother, her children and me - and we'd watch television afterwards before cleaning our teeth and going to bed. (It was assumed I'd be staying the night on the couch.)

In the morning, after late-night sex with Mrs G, and cornflakes and tea with her son and daughter, I'd take the bus to school.

One night, shortly before it all ended, my ex-girlfriend walked into her mother's bedroom and found us between the sheets. "You slut, Mum," she said, slamming the door.

Although I haven't seen Mrs G for 43 years, I've often thought about her - not in the tormented way that Bernhard Schlink's character, Michael Berg, obsessed about Hanna Schmitz in The Reader, but certainly with a sense of astonishment and disbelief. Why would she have wanted to deflower a boy in shorty pyjamas, and where did she go in subsequent years with all those unlawful desires?

Edited extract from To Begin to Know by David Leser, published by Allen & Unwin next month.